Both the basic graphical figures and the basic text operations we have seen so far share some properties. All of them require you to specifically position them at a certain point on a page (or inside a frame) using co-ordinates.

In RML, operations which position elements explicitly on the page using X-Y co-ordinates and other geometric parameters are called "graphics operations" (or just "graphics"). The other major group of tags in RML are the "flowables".

Flowables (like paragraphs, spacers, and tables) can appear in a story (or in the <place> tag). Graphics appear in <pageGraphics> and <illustration>. These two categories cannot be mixed: flowables are positioned in sequence running down a frame until the frame has no more room and then placed on the next frame (on the next page if necessary); graphics are explicitly positioned by co-ordinates.